I’ve just recently moved to Lemmy, and so far I’m enjoying it quite a bit. However, I’ve been thinking about the privacy issues whe DMing someone here.
Since this is a federated service, when you DM someone you have to trust both your server’s admin, as well as the recipient’s. Not that I particularly trusted reddit, but at least it was 1 corporation with (hopefully) some solid security procedures in place, and potential penalties for data breaches. Whereas in Lemmy, it might just be 2 random guys.
I’ve added an age key to my profile, in the hopes to make people aware of this issue. As well as giving them an option, if they wish to contact me privately.
I know, it’s not user friendly. But it’s the only way I could think of that wouldn’t rely on email + GPG. Does anyone know of a better solution?
EDIT: I also realise that not having signing capabilities might be an issue… So maybe reverting back to good ol’ GPG is a better option?
You could just ensure the other party has a key and then send them encrypted text data they could decrypt on their end.
It’s not exactly trivial to add support for this automatically in DMs because of sharing keys between users and ensuring the right keys are in use, considering it would have to be possible to rotate them at any given time.
If you need encrypted communication, use something designed for it. That’s probably the best way to go
They could add space for users to put their public key in their profiles, could have the added bonus of generating curiosity and people learning how their tech actually works.